Jordan: The Dead Sea, Balsam, and Cleopatra's Monopoly
Why did Cleopatra demand the balsam groves of Jericho as the price of financing Marc Antony's wars — and what does it mean that a plant worth twice its weight in gold was guarded day and night by Roma...
11 Kesä 25min
Australia: The War on Rabbits
How did twenty-four rabbits released by one man for a "spot of hunting" in 1859 colonise an entire continent within thirty-five years — and why did a three-thousand-kilometre fence, a campaign of pois...
11 Kesä 25min
Norway: The Potato Priest Who Fed Norway
Why did Norwegian farmers believe that eating potatoes would give them leprosy — and who were the potato priests who spent fifty years smuggling tubers home from Copenhagen in their hats to prove them...
11 Kesä 23min
Croatia: The Maraschino Cherry and the Republic of Ragusa
How did a city of 30,000 people survive for 450 years between Venice and the Ottoman Empire — and what does the Republic of Ragusa have to do with the cherry on top of your cocktail? Why does the Amer...
9 Kesä 26min
Curaçao: The Orange That Named a Liqueur
Why did a Valencia orange, abandoned on a tiny arid Caribbean island, transform into a new species that nobody could eat — and how did that inedible fruit end up in cocktail bars on every continent? W...
9 Kesä 25min
Morocco: The Argan Tree and the Women Who Saved It
Why has the argan tree — which grows nowhere else on Earth — survived for 65 million years in the mountains of Morocco, and why are the women who have tended it for centuries now earning two euros six...
9 Kesä 28min
Senegal: How Peanuts Built and Broke a Nation
Why did a South American legume become the foundation of French imperial power in West Africa — and what did it cost the people who grew it? Who was Cheikh Amadou Bamba, the Sufi mystic the French exi...
4 Kesä 29min
Ecuador: The Cinchona Tree and the Cure for Malaria
Why did the cloud forests of Ecuador produce the only cure for a disease that killed popes, hollowed out armies, and blocked European expansion into the tropics — and what did the people whose knowled...
4 Kesä 26min
